Preparations!

11 Oct 2011

Tuesday felt like an incredibly long day, but that could have been due to the fact that tomorrow is a holiday! School itself was great! I planned a fun activity for 5th grade and I think they really enjoyed it. Since they are studying activities to do in Wales with the question "Do you like...?" I thought that we should play the game "Find someone who..." With this activity, I made a list of activities, and the students had to find someone who liked that activity. It was really interesting to watch them do the activity because I think it underscored one cultural difference.

Since class sizes are so big here and the general teaching style is different (at least based on my experience so far), students aren't typically allowed to leave their seats. For this activity, I asked students to stand up and find other students to talk to. However, because students are accustomed to getting to leave their seats, a number of students were trying to yell across the room or they tried to move as far from their seats as they could without actually leaving their desk.

After school, I met up with the other Fulbrighter to go shopping for food for our American breakfast! Since we don't have school tomorrow, we talked about the idea of cooking a big American breakfast. Here breakfast typically consists of toast (with jam on it or chopped tomato) and fruit. However, shopping for the ingredients was a little difficult. For example, (at least at Mercadona) we couldn't buy any maple syrup. Oddly enough, on the back of the pancake mix, they recommended that you use chocolate syrup, caramel syrup, or strawberry syrup with the pancakes. We found all of these syrups next to the mix in the supermarket, but we couldn't find any maple syrup. I'm a little horrified to think that people actually believe that Americans eat their pancakes with chocolate syrup!